Eating vegan, running long distances and being 20-something.

Your Vegan Ramen Isn’t Vegan

This post was never supposed to happen. This was supposed to be a ranking of NYC’s best veggie ramen. However, I accidentally discovered something completely devastating in the process.

I discovered that most of NYC’s veggie ramen is not vegan.

Rewind to a few weeks ago, when I came up with the idea to eat & rank vegan ramen from all the best places in NYC. After a bit of research, I curated a list of 18 the most highly-regarded ramen restaurants that also have a veggie option. However, I wanted to make sure their vegetarian ramen was 100% vegan before I went.

So I picked up my phone and started calling the restaurants. It was then that I learned that a good majority of the vegetarian/vegan options at these places (including places where I’ve eaten in the past as a vegan) are NOT vegan. Many also falsely mark their vegetarian options as vegan on their menus, which makes it even more misleading. I even discovered one place where the vegetarian option is made with meat (Totto Ramen; explained below).

I’m not writing this blog post to attack or “expose” these ramen places, I’m more doing this because I know a lot of vegans out there love ramen and go out to eat ramen in NYC, so I thought this might be useful for them.

Ivan Ramen’s vegetarian bowl I had last summer (not vegan)

Out of the 18 places listed below, 9 of them (in red) are not vegan, as they exclusively use egg noodles, 5 (in yellow) use egg noodles but have other noodle options, and 4 (in green) have 100% vegan options.

Totto

Mokbar

Misoya

Hide-chan

Kogane

Chuko

Mr. Taka

Ramen Shack

Ganso

Ippudo

Mentoku

Ivan Ramen

Bassanova

Ramen-Ya

Nakamura

Rai Rai Ken

Shuya Cafe De Ramen

Ramen Ishida

NOT VEGAN:

TOTTO: This place COOKS THEIR NOODLES IN CHICKEN BROTH, so even their veggie ramen (which uses vegetarian broth) is not vegetarian. When I asked if they could cook the noodles in regular water, I was told no.

MOKBAR: Their veggie option, which is advertised as VEGAN, is not in fact vegan; their noodles have egg powder. Can sub rice for noodles.

I stopped going to these pseudo veg places many years ago….. could just tell from the waiters, chefs arrogance they aren’t trying very hard to be vegan. Do you really think in a busy restaurant kitchen when there are 2 pots on the stove one supposed to be vegan and the other not that they are using different spoons to stir. Ha!!!! It’s too gross to even contemplate the animal products we are given under the guise of being vegan. Why not go to 100% vegan spots….they should be receiving your $.

I think this article is super useful. Most of us don’t have all vegan friends, family and coworkers and don’t always have the option of dictating where a group is going to eat when someone else is organizing or hosting. I also think it’s important to create demand for vegan options in mainstream restaurants, so even non vegans will have vegan options :)

I wanted to try Ippudo here in Paris but when emailed they kindly replied that even though the noodles used for veggie ramen are vegan and are not cooked in meat broth, they are cooked in the same water as noodles containing eggs, so I guess that makes it cross contamination.

I wonder if I kindly ask them to cook my noodles in a separate pot they won’t do it haha :(

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! I always have a feeling in the back of my mind (especially being newly vegan) that eating out in NYC at places that are not exclusively vegan may not always be forthcoming about if their “vegan” items are actually vegan. I plan on doing as much research as possible but thank you for taking the time to do this research and help those of us who want to make sure we are truly eating vegan!